Apologies in advance to my friends who are “working” in Las Vegas and Chicago at the two popular search engine marketing conferences and one user experience show – all going on this week. I’m at home, all warm and cozy and haven’t yet had to race to a press room or freak out over a dead laptop battery. Sheer heaven.
For those of us who stayed home…
Donna has an excellent how-to on creating social site profiles – Using Social Profile Pages To Your Advantage Why?
They often show up prominently in the search engine results pages. If someone searches for you by your brand name, or nick, there’s a very good chance your social network profile pages will show up in the top 10 results. The reputation management / branding aspects of this alone makes the act of creating profile pages a worthwhile endeavor.
Scott has been doing some keyword “research” in much the same way I do people watching, only he got into the math, whereas I would never get past the “cool shirt” stage. According to Blondes ARE the most popular… (Bah!), blondes are searched for the most, as are cats and Hentai, the latter of which up until today I had never heard of.
When I’m Not Doing SEO
I was tagged by Barry (aka Rustybrick) because we’re both at home lounging around eating bon bons while everyone else is blogging conferences.
I’m no longer an SEO (officially), but I refer work to my SEO Partners and follow the industry because when they need usability help, they may want somebody besides Shari and Matt. (giggle) So, being officially tagged, when I’m not doing anything for Cre8pc, UsabilityEffect and Cre8asiteforums, with the few remaining ounces of energy I have left I:
1. READ. I read an enormous number of books. Usually I have several going at once. They’re in my car, backpack, every room of the house and my office. For fun, I drive to Borders just to read there, instead of here.
2. Sports. As in spectator. Working from home allows me to attend my son’s sporting events in football, wrestling, hockey and baseball. I’m the equipment carrier, snack/water mom, taxi, and start to cry whenever he does something amazing. I’m pathetic that way. Related sport: Trying to keep an eye on daughter and her boyfriend.
3. In Winter, when I’m not working, nothing makes me happier than baking bread or preparing a meal with the kids, who have a knack for and interest in food and putting together fresh/whole/organic dinners. I love making big pots of homemade soup on cold days. Spring, Summer and Fall I have the gardens to tend to for flowers, herbs and veggies. I weed, rescue hockey pucks from the beds and thank my vegetable plants for producing for us as well as they do.
For “When I’m Not Doing SEO”, I tag:
Sophie Wegat
Barry Welford
Elizabeth Able
I Am One of 50
One of my articles on usability and seo has been chosen for The Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year. The beauty of this is discovering a new blog with business advice. Thank you for the honor!
The Perpetual Super-Novice is the perfect article for those who are looking to understand the big picture. It talks about product design, what people want from it, and what motivates them to keep using it. In addition, it touches on how people look for help or more information on it. This is where search comes into play, among other things. Much of the relationship between seo and usability has to do with understanding user behavior. As the article states:
Now let’s think about how people behave when they’re intrinsically motivated to learn more about how something works. What do they do? They do things like
* asking other people
* searching reference content
* searching the Web
* browsing forums and other archival sources of information
Finally…I just love this latest from Jeffrey Zeldman…Stealing design. At the moment he has 10 comments for a blog post that consists of one full sentence.
The man is brilliant.
